Radar · 2025-09
September 2025
A self-replicating worm spreads through npm days after the chalk and debug compromise puts billions of weekly downloads at risk, actively exploited Cisco ASA vulnerabilities are targeted in Australia, WordPress 6.8.3 fixes two authenticated vulnerabilities and the September ISM reworks its AI and supply chain controls.
What's on our radar this month: releases, advisories and standards across the stack we run and the platforms we integrate with.
AI platform and models
Sections- notable Bedrock
Bedrock adds global cross-region inference for Claude Sonnet 4 — aws.amazon.com
On 3 September 2025 AWS introduced a global cross-region inference profile for Claude Sonnet 4 on Amazon Bedrock: requests can now route to any supported commercial region for burst throughput, where previously only geography-scoped US, EU and APAC profiles existed.
For AU workloads this is a data-residency decision point, not just a capacity feature — choosing the global profile means inference can run outside Australia, so sovereignty-sensitive deployments should stay on the geography-scoped APAC profile deliberately.
- fyi Anthropic
Claude Sonnet 4.5 released with a focus on coding and agents — anthropic.com
Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 4.5 on 29 September, positioning it as its strongest model for coding, agent workflows and computer use, at the same price as Claude Sonnet 4. Anthropic says it is available everywhere from launch, including the Claude API, which matters for teams standardising agentic tooling in their build and content pipelines.
No action on release. The relevance is to the standardisation decision rather than the model: where agentic tooling is being fixed in build or content pipelines, arriving at the same price as the previous Sonnet is what makes changing the default cheap to justify. Benchmark your own prompts before switching, because a stronger model on published benchmarks is not automatically better on your task.
- fyi MCP
Next Model Context Protocol release confirmed for November — modelcontextprotocol.io
The MCP project published an update on 26 September confirming the next protocol version will land in late November 2025, with a release candidate period beforehand. Teams building MCP servers or clients get a predictable window to review breaking changes before adopting the new spec.
Nothing to do in September; the date is the point. Anyone running an MCP server or client gets a release candidate window before late November, so the work this creates is a diary entry to read the breaking changes during that window rather than after the spec lands.
Security and edge
Sections- critical ACSC
Actively exploited Cisco ASA vulnerabilities targeted in Australia — cyber.gov.au
In late September the ACSC warned that multiple vulnerabilities in Cisco ASA 5500-X series devices, including the critical remote code execution flaw CVE-2025-20333, were being targeted within Australia. The campaign prompted CISA Emergency Directive 25-03 for US federal agencies; the UK NCSC published a related malware report on RayInitiator and LINE VIPER.
If your network edge includes Cisco ASA or Firepower devices, patch immediately, check for indicators of compromise, and review remote access VPN exposure.
- notable OpenSSL
OpenSSL patches three vulnerabilities in the 30 September 2025 advisory — openssl-library.org
The OpenSSL project published fixes on 30 September 2025 for three CVEs. The most serious is an out-of-bounds read and write in CMS password-based decryption that can corrupt memory (CVE-2025-9230, Moderate). The others are a timing side channel in SM2 signing on 64-bit ARM (CVE-2025-9231, Moderate; not in 3.0) and an out-of-bounds read in the HTTP client's no_proxy handling (CVE-2025-9232, Low). Updated 3.x releases include 3.5.4, 3.4.3, 3.3.5, 3.2.6 and 3.0.18.
Update OpenSSL via your OS or base-image packages; anything terminating TLS or processing CMS messages should pick up the patched releases in the next maintenance window.
- notable TLS
ACME Renewal Information becomes an internet standard — letsencrypt.org
On 16 September 2025 Let's Encrypt announced that ACME Renewal Information — the mechanism letting a certificate authority tell clients to renew early — was published as RFC 9773 after four years of development. ARI exists so mass-revocation events do not translate into outages: the CA signals the renewal window, clients spread the load.
Confirm your ACME automation consumes ARI — it is how a CA can signal an early renewal so a mass revocation does not become an outage.
Standards and compliance
Sections- notable ISM
ISM September 2025 update reworks AI and supply chain controls — github.com
The ASD released the September 2025 update to the Information security manual. Controls for large language model applications were broadened to cover generative AI, a new control recommends storing AI models in file formats that cannot execute arbitrary code, and supplier controls were reworded from 'trusted' to 'trustworthy' to emphasise verifiable trust.
Agencies and suppliers aligned to the ISM should review the change log, particularly if AI features are in scope of an upcoming IRAP assessment.
- notable Privacy Act
Kmart's facial recognition ruled a Privacy Act breach — oaic.gov.au
On 18 September 2025 the Privacy Commissioner determined Kmart breached the Privacy Act by running facial recognition across 28 stores between 2020 and 2022 without notice or consent, collecting the biometrics of every visitor to counter refund fraud. The Commissioner found the collection disproportionate to the aim, with less invasive options available — the second facial recognition determination after Bunnings.
The consent and proportionality bar for biometric or invasive analytics is now well established through repeated enforcement — any deployment needs notice, a documented necessity analysis, and a serious look at less invasive alternatives first.
- notable eSafety
eSafety operationalises the under-16 social media rules — esafety.gov.au
September 2025 was the month the Social Media Minimum Age regime became operational guidance: in early September eSafety released a self-assessment tool for services to determine whether they are likely to be age-restricted platforms and wrote to technology companies including Google, Meta, Snap and TikTok, then published its regulatory guidance on 16 September setting principles-based reasonable steps — detect and deactivate under-16 accounts, prevent re-registration, counter circumvention and provide a review path for over-16s wrongly restricted — ahead of the 10 December commencement.
Anyone running community or user-generated-content features should run the self-assessment and map the reasonable-steps expectations now, rather than assuming the regime only reaches the named platforms.
CMS and platforms
Sections- notable Drupal
Drupal security team issues guidance on third-party library supply chains — drupal.org
On 17 September the Drupal security team published PSA-2025-09-17 in response to the npm maintainer-account takeovers affecting the wider web ecosystem. It reminds site owners that the security team's remit covers code hosted on drupal.org, and that monitoring third-party JavaScript and PHP dependencies is the site owner's responsibility. Drupal itself was not affected.
Review how your Drupal builds pull in npm and Composer dependencies, and make sure front-end build tooling is covered by your patching process.
- notable WordPress
WordPress 6.8.3 fixes two authenticated vulnerabilities — wordpress.org
WordPress 6.8.3, released 30 September, is a security release with two fixes: one for a flaw that let authenticated users access certain restricted content, and one for an issue that allowed navigation menus to be exploited by an authenticated user. The next major, 6.9, was planned for 2 December 2025.
Update all WordPress sites to 6.8.3. Sites with auto-updates enabled should already have it; verify rather than assume.
Supply chain, CI/CD and IaC
Sections- critical npm
chalk and debug compromise puts billions of weekly downloads at risk — bleepingcomputer.com
On 8 September attackers phished a prolific npm maintainer via a fake npm support domain and published malicious versions of 18 widely used packages including chalk, debug and ansi-styles, which together see more than two billion downloads a week. The payload targeted browser-side cryptocurrency transactions; a fresh install between 09:00 and 11:30 ET (13:00 to 15:30 UTC) that day could have pulled a compromised version.
Check lockfiles created on 8 September (13:00 to 15:30 UTC) for the affected versions, pin dependencies, and prefer lockfile-based installs in CI so a fresh resolve cannot pull a poisoned release.
- critical npm
Self-replicating Shai-Hulud worm spreads through npm — cisa.gov
A self-replicating worm dubbed Shai-Hulud compromised more than 500 npm packages. After stealing maintainer credentials it injected malicious post-install scripts into further packages, harvested developer and cloud credentials, and published stolen secrets to a public GitHub repository named Shai-Hulud. CISA issued a formal alert on 23 September and advised pinning to releases produced before 16 September 2025.
Rotate npm, GitHub and cloud credentials on any machine that installed affected packages, enable phishing-resistant MFA for registry accounts, and consider disabling lifecycle scripts by default in CI.
Languages, runtimes and frameworks
Sections- notable Laravel
Laravel 11 moves to security-only support — laravel.com
Laravel 11 reached the end of its bug-fix window on 3 September 2025 and now receives security fixes only, with those ending on 12 March 2026. Laravel 12, a deliberately low-breakage maintenance release, has been the current major since February.
Plan Laravel 11 upgrades to 12 before the March 2026 security cut-off; most applications can move without code changes.
- notable Go
Go 1.25.1 patches a net/http CrossOriginProtection bypass — go.dev
Go 1.25.1 fixes CVE-2025-47910 in
net/http:CrossOriginProtection.AddInsecureBypassPatterncould exempt more requests than intended. The advisory applies to Go 1.25.0 only.Rebuild Go 1.25 services on 1.25.1.
Static site and web tooling
Sections- fyi Astro
Astro 5.14 lands with new routing tools — astro.build
September's Astro minor release, 5.14, added new routing tools, async Svelte rendering and React 19 actions support. Teams tracking the 5.x line should test the routing changes before rolling out.
Test the routing changes before rolling out if you track the 5.x line, since routing is where a minor can alter behaviour without breaking a build. Nothing else in this release needs a window.
- fyi Safari
Safari 26 ships 75 new WebKit features including anchor positioning and WebGPU — webkit.org
Safari 26.0 shipped on 15 September with 75 new features, including anchor positioning, scroll-driven animations, HDR images, SVG icon support and WebGPU, and lets any website be installed as a web app on iOS and iPadOS. Worth revisiting feature-detection assumptions and progressive enhancement fallbacks that treated these features as Chrome-only.
Worth a deliberate pass rather than an upgrade. The assumption to re-check is anywhere a codebase treats anchor positioning, scroll-driven animations or WebGPU as Chromium-only, because that fallback is now dead weight and occasionally worse than the native path. Installable web apps on iOS also changes what can be proposed to a client without building an app.
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